Chapter Text

Prologue

It isn’t a grim day. The sun kisses her cheeks as she walks – leaving her face flushed with a trace of summer glow. The large, looming clouds litters the endless sky above and the crisp air is soft and fleeting against her skin.

Her soles make no sound as she walks over what seems to be a brittle and chipped brick pathway. Ivies with tiny red bulbs sprout from the cracks of the graying trail and crawls all the way to the trees. The wild ivies cover the trunks entirely, like tight corsets, and curtains of thick, green leaves hang off the branches. Tall sparse shrubs with wild flowers are inconspicuous gateways to the numerous trails that branch away from the main brick road.

With the media circus gone to the next town and all the tedious paperwork done, she finally has the time to mourn.

She had a good life with him; he was a good man. He was dependable with uncanny wit. He wasn’t jaded and was easy to read. He liked his steak medium rare and his aftershave smelt like autumn.

It was easy, so easy to picture forever with him.

As she walks further down the narrow pathway, the dark green leaves of the trees shade her from the sun. The hill is quiet except for the usual summer choir of singing crickets and telltale buzzing of the beetles deep in the forest and the occasional chirping of the birds somewhere in the wood area. She would hear a quiet rustle behind her and she distracts herself thinking that those are simply some tiny woodland creatures being friendly and nothing else. Soon enough, she steps into a clearing.

The clearing gives way to a small Buddhist cemetery with most graves abandoned and weathered. She stalls feet away from his tombstone. She shifts her weight, and heaves a shallow, short sigh. Her vision almost blackened out as she strains her eyes looking up at the sun.

The wind has picked up by the time she crossed that seemingly never-ending distance to his grave. Her eyes glaze over the impersonal family plot marker and her eyes feel tired and too dry.

She falls on her knees, slowly, and touches the frame perched at the center. She traces her fingers over his smiling face and eyes that shine and wrinkle in bliss she barely remembers now. She can almost feel warmth from the tips of her fingers. She trembles as she remembers him but her eyes remain dry.

A stronger wind breezes through and there seems to be a promise of rain tonight.